Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.
— Jonas Salk
The worst tragedy that could have befallen me was my success. I knew right away that I was through – cast out.
— Jonas Salk
If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.
— Jonas Salk
Solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don’t invent the answer-you reveal the answer.
— Jonas Salk
Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what’s been taught them.
— Jonas Salk
The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
— Jonas Salk
I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?
— Jonas Salk
Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don’t recognize the pattern and the significance. It’s the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It’s a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it’s positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It’s like a journey. It’s like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else.
— Jonas Salk
Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process.
— Jonas Salk
Eventually we’ll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.
— Jonas Salk
It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling.
— Jonas Salk
If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born.
— Jonas Salk
My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.
— Jonas Salk
Nothing happens quite by chance. It’s a question of accretion of information and experience.
— Jonas Salk
Wisdom: It’s something that you know when you see it. You can recognize it, you can experience it. I have defined wisdom as the capacity to make judgments that when looked back upon will seem to have been wise.
— Jonas Salk
This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man – if man is not enslaved by it.
— Jonas Salk
I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that’s one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in a positive, creative, constructive way, revealing the truth and beauty that exists in life and in nature.
— Jonas Salk
It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It’s my partner.
— Jonas Salk
A good parent gives their child roots and wings.
— Jonas Salk
I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution, because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time.
— Jonas Salk
I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.
— Jonas Salk
Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.
— Jonas Salk
Image Credit :By SAS Scandinavian Airlines (http://images.flysas.com) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
.jpg){kind=link}